The transition from young layman aspiring to be a physician to the young physician skilled in technique and confident in his dealings with patients is slow and halting. To study medicine is generally rated one of the major educational ordeals of American youth. The difficulty of this process and how medical students feel about their training, their doctor-teachers, and the profession they are entering is the target of this study. Now regarded as a classic, Boys in White is of vital interest to medical educators and sociologists.

By daily interviews and observations in...

Based on three years of detailed anthropological observation, this account of undergraduate culture portrays students' academic relations to faculty and administration as one of subjection. With rare intervals in crisis moments, student life has always been dominated by grades and grade point averages. The authors of Making the Grade maintain that, though it has taken different forms from tune to time, the emphasis on grades has persisted in academic life. From this premise they argue that the social organization giving rise to this emphasis has remained remarkably stable...